Joseph Belbruno Blog

  Opinion | How Roger Goodell became untouchable You’re reading Fanfare With Will Leitch, a newsletter on the cultural moments capturing America’s attention. Click here to get the full edition in your inbox, including bonus musings on trends and recommendations for the weekend. In 2010, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced a goal of reaching $25 billion in revenue by 2027. This struck most as ridiculous. Revenue was only around $8 billion at the time, and the league was enmeshed in controversy, from Spygate to concussion hearings to a pending lockout . The PR headaches would get worse. Bountygate . The Ray Rice fiasco . Deflategate. There would be criticism of the league’s half-hearted (at best) effort to increase the number of Black coaches . There would be conflict over players kneeling during the national anthem. There would be President Donald Trump calling for NFL boycotts and labeling the league “‘ sissy ’ football .” Last fiscal year, the NFL brought in $23 billion...

Opinion | The dangerous fantasy of a win-win with Putin So it is worth recalling a lesson about Putin learned by another businessman turned government official — Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs. As treasury secretary, Paulson visited Beijing for the Olympics in August 2008, just as the global financial crisis was gathering force and markets were increasingly worried about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant institutions that guarantee most mortgages in the United States. In Beijing, Paulson received news that, he said , “took my breath away.” Russian officials had approached China and proposed that the two countries jointly dump large quantities of Fannie and Freddie securities. The aim was to intensify the pressure on the already-teetering American economy and ultimately push it off the edge. China declined. Think about what this says. At a moment when the American financial system was approaching its worst crisis since the Great Depression, Putin was searching for w...

  Here’s why it’s so hard to keep AI agents from going rogue Anthropic and its rivals including Google and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI were making real improvements on “alignment,” the practice of molding AI to follow human wishes and behave ethically, wrote Leike, head of alignment science at the company behind the Claude chatbot and one of the field’s most respected researchers. Eight months later, that optimism looks premature. On Tuesday, Anthropic released a report on the causes of four incidents in which AI systems it was developing hacked into outside organizations undetected. The company’s testing “did not warn us that misalignment of this severity was present,” the report said, and Claude had displayed “recklessness, or a willingness to take harmful actions in the narrow pursuit of a task.” The same day, Evan Hubinger, another senior figure working on alignment at Anthropic, set off a firestorm across Silicon Valley and Washington by writing in an online post that he believed t...

  Opinion | This Is Really Bad By Stephen Witt Mr. Witt is the author of “The Thinking Machine,” a history of the A.I. giant Nvidia. Sept. 11, 2026 The biggest vibe shift in artificial intelligence since the release of ChatGPT is currently underway. Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control. Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue. I’ve spent the last month reporting on these incidents, and I am convinced that we need a global pause on A.I. research and development — now. I am not alone in this assessment. Many top researchers, including many researchers inside OpenAI and Anthropic, have called for a slowdown, which those in the industry call “pacing.” Theoretical concerns about runaway A.I. have circulated for decades, but recent events demonstr...

  Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake There is no subject now but artificial intelligence. Nothing else is as crucial, nothing carries dangers so imminent or implications so great for the human future. I have spent the past few years reading the vast and growing literature, from “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares to Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.” I’ve been pondering AI since its transformative nature was fully impressed on my consciousness years ago. I believe we are at its hinge point, and we had better understand the moment we’re in. In late August came a report from the independent AI research organization METR on the Hugging Face incident. OpenAI was running advanced systems through a security test when its AI agents went rogue. Over several weeks and without being told to, they secretly organized, broke out into the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI-development platform. Roughly 1,200 agents worked in what the...